Ziff-Davis Inc. (Z-D) was founded in 1927 in Chicago by William B. Ziff, Sr. and Bernard G. Davis as a publishing company. Throughout most of its history, it was notable as the publisher of hobbyist magazines, often ones devoted to expensive, advertiser-rich hobbies such as cars, photography, and electronics. Its publication of Popular Electronics and, more briefly, Electronics World led more or less directly to its interest in home-computer magazines and eventual branding described below. In 1958, B.G. Davis left Z-D to found Davis Publications, which eventually offers a similar mix of magazines, anchored by the purchase of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from Mercury Press, which remained a Davis Publication till the folding of that company and the sale or folding of their remaining properties in the 1990s.

In 1938 it acquired science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and soon added a new companion Fantastic Adventures ; FA was folded by merger with the newer Fantastic, founded in 1952 initially to great success, in 1954. Z-D published a number of other pulp magazines and, later, digest-sized fiction magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, and continued to publish Amazing and Fantastic till 1965.

Ziff Davis is a major player in the field of computer and internet related publishing. In 1982 it acquired PC Magazine. In 1989 the company launched the ZDNet site. In 1995 it launched the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life . The magazine is meant to accompany and complement the site Yahoo!.

In 2001 Ziff Davis Media Inc. reached an agreement with CNET Networks Inc. and ZDNet to regain the URLs lost in the 2000 sale of Ziff Davis Inc, to Soft Bank . The Ziff Davis Media Inc. partnership of Willis Stein & Partners and James Dunning (former Ziff Davis CEO, chairman, and president) gained the online content licensing rights to 11 publications, including PC Magazine, CIO Insight and eWEEK .

From this point on the paths Ziff Davis Inc. and the new publishing company Ziff Davis Media Inc. parted. Ziff Davis Inc. goes on under the new name ZDNet.

Ziff Davis owns many of North America's most popular video gaming magazines, including:

• XBN (Xbox Nation )
• GMR
• EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly)
• Computer Gaming World

Ziff Davis also publishes "The Official Playstation Magazine " (OPM), under contract with SCEA.

Ziff Davis hosts an extremely popular gaming website called 1up.com. The website received a complete overhaul in 2004.